A good first step in incorporating and teaching new media texts in composition classrooms is through focusing on visual literacy in print and digital texts. Composition teachers, because many are not formally trained in the applications associated with many digital new media texts (Dreamweaver, desktop publishing, photo editing), feel like they don’t have the expertise to teach and guide students in composing new media texts. The assignments Selfe offers connect visual and alphabetic literacies (which composition teachers are more comfortable with), use rhetorical approaches, not entirely Web-based, and position the teacher and the students as co-learners. Though teachers will probably feel outside their comfort zone at first, Selfe argues for the importance of bridging to visual literacies and to begin to question the privileging alphabetic texts in our society and in the structuring of our writing programs and pedagogies.

Quotable Quotes

“By adding a focus on visual literacy to our existing focus on alphabetic literacy, we may not only learn to pay more serious attention to the ways in which students are now ordering and making sense of the world through the production and consumption of visual images, but we may also extend the usefulness of composition studies in a changing world.” (72)

Notable Notes

faculty feel like they lack the necessary skills to teach new media literacies, to help students compose with it – the faculty has an illiteracy that they have to come to terms with, will “force us to acknowledge gaps in our own literacy sets” (72)

change “author” to “composer/designer” and the reader to “reader/viewer”

assignments include a visual essay, visual argument, visual exhibition, and a text re-design and re-vision for the Web

composition studies needs to continue to be relevant to our students, so we have an obligation to learn about them and use them (new media literacies) in our classrooms as we ask our students to compose